I'm a staff writer covering venture capital, enterprise and NY startups, with a little ad tech sprinkled in. I make the Midas List and 30 Under 30 for VC. A short-lived but much-beloved former homepage editor at Forbes, I wrote for Fortune Magazine from 2010-2012 and was a proud WNYC intern before that. I've served as a regional manager for a test prep company along the way. My love of tech would've been amusing to my college self, as I graduated from Harvard with a degree in medieval history and archaeology. Follow me on Twitter at @alexrkonrad and email me at akonrad@forbes.com.

Another IPO For Boston: HubSpot Files $100 Million Public Offering

HubSpot has joined WayfairWayfair as another looming big win for the Boston tech community. The marketing software company filed to go public on Monday, looking to raise as much as $100 million in its IPO.

In the documents, the eight-year-old HubSpot claims it works with more than 11,500 customers and had revenue last year of $77.6 million on 50% year-to-year growth. That growth had held about steady for the first six months of 2014 so far, with the company taking in $51.3 million, an increase of 46% year-to-year.

Like many subscription companies when they look to go public, HubSpot is not profitable. It lost $34.3 million last year and had a net loss of $17.7 million for the first six months of 2014. Software subscriptions typically take several years to get in the black on any given deal. In its filing, HubSpot said that its typical customer is a medium-sized business of between 10 and 2,000 employees, paying an average $8,823 per customer per year.

The company was founded out of MIT, where Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah were graduate students who bounded, they write, over the shortcomings of marketers working with startups and their mutual love of Belgian beer. The duo founded HubSpot with the goal of centralizing different marketing automation and search engine optimization tools into one platform to help with “inbound” marketing. Inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing in that it’s created by a company to get attention, such as through posts over social media like Facebook and TwitterTwitter, as opposed to paying for eyeballs with a television spot or display ad.

HubSpot employees a little more than 700 employees, the majority of them in the United States in Cambridge in the greater Boston area. A team of just under 90 staff work in Ireland. Twenty percent of HubSpot’s customer base is outside the United States.

The IPO should be a major win for Boston tech, which is already anticipating a big public offering since ecommerce company Wayfair filed to go public just days ago. The two big investor winners should be area venture capitalists Larry Bohn and David Skok: Bohn’s General Catalyst owns 27.1% of the company, having first invested in 2007. Skok and Matrix Partners joined in 2008 and own 17.1%. West Coast investors aren’t left out, as Scale Venture Partners holds 6.8% and Series D investor Sequoia Capital maintains a 10.3% stake. Charles River Ventures and GoogleGoogle Ventures are also holders.

The Wall Street Journal speculated in Feb. that HubSpot’s market valuation could end up around $1.3 billion compared to marketing automation public company Marketo, which back then held a value of $1.7 billion. Marketo grew its revenue faster than Hubspot last year, taking in $95.9 million on 64% growth, but had higher losses of $47.4 million. One year since its own public offering, Marketo is itself still reporting losses.

But Marketo’s stock has since plummeted about 33%, and HubSpot may debut at less than that valuation when it hits the market. Even if HubSpot does go public as a a billion dollar company, its founders would have a very long way to go to become billionaires themselves. Halligan owns about 5% of the company; Shah just under 9%.

“We want to build a company our grandkids can be proud of,” Halligan told Forbes last year. “Were not there yet but we’re on the way.”

By filing to go public, HubSpot just got another step closer.

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